Scott Joplin (c. 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an African American composer and pianist famous for his ragtime compositions. Born to a working-class family of formerly enslaved people in Arkansas, Joplin received piano lessons from local teacher Julius Weiss and started his own dance band, singing in a vocal quartet and playing mandolin. Eventually he struck out on his own as an itinerant musician, winding up at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where his band helped contribute to the growing craze for ragtime music.
He first achieved fame in 1899 when his piano composition Maple Leaf Rag became a smash hit, earning Joplin the title "King of Ragtime." He continued to compose and publish regularly, with his piano rags being reliable hits, and also trying his hand at more ambitious works. His opera A Guest of Honor had a successful performance tour in 1903, but his score was confiscated and is now considered lost. A second opera, Treemonisha, suffered funding difficulties and was only partially staged during Joplin's lifetime; it was finally premiered posthumously in 1972.
Joplin died in 1917 at the age of 48. While ragtime fell out of fashion not long after his passing, his music was considered very influential in the development of Jazz, especially the Swing and Stride subgenres.
In 1973, Joplin's music experienced a resurgence of popularity from the movie The Sting, which prominently featured a performance of "The Entertainer" by Marvin Hamlisch, hitting #1 on the Billboard charts and winning an Academy Award for best adapted score. Since then his compositions have been more fully appreciated as important pieces of music history and as sophisticated works of art in their own right. In 1976 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American music.
No relation to Janis Joplin.
Tropes:
- Berserk Button: Apparently, he was annoyed by people playing "Maple Leaf Rag" too fast as a show-off piece. Several of Joplin's later piano scores are prefaced with the performance direction, "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast!"
- Biopic: A 1977 movie entitled Scott Joplin starred Billy Dee Williams as the composer.
- Dance Sensation:
- Ragtime was wildly popular for dances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- In-Universe, Treemonisha concludes with the title character teaching everyone how to dance "The Real Slow Drag." Joplin even included a description of the dance steps in his libretto.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: In Treemonisha, the main character is tied up by the villains and threatened with being pushed into a tree with a wasp's nest inside. It doesn't take much to see this as a metaphor for lynching.
- Doorstop Baby: In Treemonisha, the heroine is a foundling. The couple who find and raise her name her after her foster mother, Monisha—and the tree under which they found her.
- Downer Ending: Joplin died without ever seeing his masterpiece Treemonisha fully produced.
- Easily Forgiven: At the conclusion of Treemonisha, Treemonisha forgives the people who were trying to harm her, on the grounds that they were just acting out of superstition and fear and would benefit more from education than retribution. Everyone sees the wisdom of this and makes her their community leader.
- Monochrome Casting:
- Every character in Treemonisha is black, portraying the struggles of an African American community trying to find their own way after the end of slavery.
- An interesting unanswered question about A Guest of Honor: If the plot of the story involved an interracial dinner between Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, as widely assumed, then did the production feature a mixed-race cast? If so, that would have been almost unheard of in the U.S. in 1903.
- The Piano Player: Joplin made a living as a pianist playing ragtime in bars and dance clubs.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Joplin's 1903 opera A Guest of Honor (now lost) is believed to have dramatized the story of a 1901 state dinner between President Theodore Roosevelt and prominent African American educator Booker T. Washington.
- Standard Snippet: Plenty! "Maple Leaf Rag
", "The Entertainer", and "The Easy Winners", among others, get a ton of play, especially when an "old timey" feel is needed. - Small Reference Pools: Joplin himself has become synonymous with the entire genre of Ragtime music, to the point that listeners who are not serious fans or music historians will possibly not even be aware that any other Ragtime composers existed.
- Uncommon Time: Zig-Zagged. Ragtime is marked by accompaniments that are in a straight vanilla 4/4 Common Time meter (or more rarely 3/4), but with elaborately syncopated melodies that are rarely aligned on the beat. The effect is a distinctive "ragged" feel that gave the genre its name.
